Google’s latest report has just shown up. Though the surprises are not major, we are seeing some improvements. Android 2.2 is still taking the lead, but that’s something that might not last long. It seems the latest Android versions (Gingerbread and Honeycomb) are starting to gain more momentum, while the other versions are slowly starting to disappear.

As evidenced in the graph, there is a huge boost in the latest smartphone Android versions, Android 2.3.3 – 2.3.4 Gingerbread. Since not many devices have these versions, it might just mean a lot of people are currently getting their upgrades to the latest devices.

Let’s take a look at the numbers from last month in order to better understand the changes. The first graph was taken from the June 1 report, and the one to the right is from this month.

As you can see, all older versions of Android are slowly but surely diminishing, including the almighty Froyo. Even the earlier builds of Gingerbread are starting to go away, as they are overtaken by Gingerbread 2.3.3 – 2.3.4. The latest Gingerbread versions went from 8.1% to 23.7%–the biggest jump we have seen lately (in a two-month period). Also, Honeycomb has just broken through the 1% threshold and reached a healthy 1.3% (across all 3 versions). This may not be that impressive, but at least we know Android tablet platforms are starting to gain some popularity.

It seems to be a good month for Android! Froyo is still seated at the top, but users are leaving the older versions. And a large number of people are coming to the latest. Tablets are getting a bit more popular, so let’s strive for reaching that 2%!

So, what Android version do you have? What device are you rocking? Are any of our readers still on Android 2.1 and below? How many of you jumped to Android 2.3.3 – 2.3.4 lately? How and why?

Hello, I am Edgar Cervantes. I am an avid Android fan, and keeping myself updated on the topic is part of my daily life. I will always work hard to give the best of me to our community of Android enthusiasts, and I am very honored to be part of this ship. Hopefully we can all enjoy sharing our knowledge and opinions!

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Great to hear there is progress being made though do you guys know if this takes into account rooted devices? with builds like cyanogenmod and many others? Right now im on 2.3.3 on my droid x. Ive only had the droid x for a month or so but with my OG droid i was on 2.3.3 for a while. As far as how well i rooted my droid 1 and droid x of course. Droid x was a bit trickier but it was fun doing all that sbf’ing and all. Why i did it well i like being on the latest build on android as with every build it gets better and better. Also like mentioned i like rooting phones and flashing roms its fun to me.

As far as I know, these stats are based on devices accessing the market. Your device tells the Market what version of Android it is running when you access it. So, rooted devices would show under whichever category the ROM they are running reports, rather than the “official” version for the device.

Giving serious thought to jumping ship to 2.3.5 cyanogenmod for my droid x which is interesting to see that it is not even on there which is why im thingking it may not be taking rooted devices into account. But again if anyone knows for sure let me know.

I’m not saying 2.3.5 doesn’t exist, it’s just not officially released yet. That is, the source code is out, but there’s no public announcement of what’s new (should appear on both the official blog and the developers site), or when it’s being rolled out.

Well… 5,500 Tablets a day isn’t bad by any means. If there are 550,000 android devices activated daily, 1% of those would be 5,500 Honeycombs. At this rate it would be over 2 million tablets by the end of the year.
Now, I think it’s a little inflated because every time someone roots their phone it probably shows up as a new activation. Then again, I don’t know this for sure. Just speculation.

Is it true only a select few OEMs receive access to Honeycomb? Is that because Google wants to make sure Honeycomb is gone when Ice Cream Sandwich arrives? The less Honeycomb tablets, the easier it is to update date ALL of them to Ice Cream?

I’m locked into 2.1 with a Samsung Galaxy SPICA. Of course it’s on contract so I have a nice cost ahead of me if I wanted to upgrade it. Lesson learned though, both about contracts and about Samsung support.

As encouraging as this news sounds like, it’s actually depressing to say that there are 9 variants of a ~3 year-old OS floating around. The most depressing thing is one of the key component of the OS — the web browser is not upgradeable. Unlike other native Google apps, if you are stuck in Android 2.1, you are forever stuck with its web browser. If someone comes up with a way to exploit a security hole in your browser, I don’t see how you can be saved — Google does not seem to have a plan to fix such problem in a speedy manner.

The last stats were released July 5th. At that time Honeycomb accounted for 0.9% of all Android devices. It was also mentioned that there were 130 million Android devices and they were growing at 550 000 per day.

Given those numbers the total should now be at 154.4 million Android devices and with 1.3% running Honeycomb the total number of Honeycomb tablets should be at 2 million, up from 1.17 million from just 4 weeks ago.

My Samsung Galaxy Spica (i5700) is still on 2.1, although I use it only as a VoIP phone (Viber, Skype, Nimbuzz, etc.) and WiFi pager (let’s me know when I receive mail, tweets, facebook comments, etc.).

This is great news for new Android users, but for me this is plain news. I have a Huawei U8220 and Huawei released it with Android 1.5 but have released Android 2.1 which still doesn’t work properley. For me, Android 2.1 is the end of the road. If only Google made Ice Cream Sandwich available for ALL phones.